Reincarnation

The timeline starts with the 1970 massacre at the hotel, establishing a traumatic past. Thirty-five years later, a horror director uses the same setting to recreate the events, bringing the story into the mid-2000s. This shift creates a contrast between a discreet, secretive era of horror and a contemporary world obsessed with reviving old crimes on screen. The film thus threads the years together through memory and séance-like repetition.

The story unfolds across several locations: a desolate local hotel where the 1970 massacre occurred, a film studio and on-location shoots in the surrounding town during the later era, and a mental ward where Nagisa is confined. Each setting anchors a different layer of the haunting—historic tragedy, modern filmmaking, and psychological containment. The town serves as a stage for the ghosts to traverse between past and present, while the ward embodies the attempt to separate nightmare from reality.

🪞 Past Lives

The narrative treats bodies and places as vessels for memories that refuse to stay buried. Ghosts of the victims reappear across decades, suggesting souls traverse the living world through the film’s frame. Reincarnation is depicted less as metaphysical certainty and more as a process that bleeds into acting, filming, and spectatorship. The film invites viewers to question whether identity is fixed or carried forward by haunting histories.

🎭 Obsession

Characters chase answers about reincarnation by immersing themselves in the past through the massacre’s footage. The director’s fixation to reconstruct the event mirrors the killer’s original fixation, linking creation and destruction. On-set hauntings intensify when fiction starts to mirror reality, making the line between cinema and horror dangerously thin. This obsession catalyzes the characters’ psychological unraveling.

🔮 Reality vs Illusion

The film relentlessly blurs what is real with what is staged, as Nagisa reenacts events during her hallucinatory experiences. The camera’s eye seems to capture shifting truths, turning the act of filming into a gateway for supernatural influence. When actors transform into their roles and the past speaks through reflective surfaces, spectators are forced to doubt what they see. The result is a meta-narrative where storytelling becomes a dangerous conduit for spirits.

👻 Haunting Presence

Ghosts of the victims permeate every layer of the production, from the hotel’s past to the present shoot and the mental ward’s isolation. The souls request recognition through images, objects, and memory, unsettling both characters and viewers. The film builds atmosphere by letting hauntings intrude on choice, control, and the ethics of revisiting murder for art. The final images imply that the past remains active and jealous of the living.